1. More
Ralls Than Not. Ted Rallz [sic], sometime political cartoonist
and cultural gadfly and general all-around spiteful malcontent, is
hard at work, performing his usual shtick. If you've read the
interview with him in The Comics Journal No. 206 (August 1998), you
doubtless realize that the man doesn't like anything. In fact, he
dislikes everything. Everything except the kind of skuzzy atmosphere
of a New York subway. "My [drawing] style," he announced (with some
measure of pride, I thought), "is an attempt to create that
atmosphere on paper."
In his relentless crusade to demean everything,
he recently attacked
Art Spiegelman in The Village Voice. It is transparently the act of
a man nearly eaten up with envy. Rallz's bitterness rings through
the piece like a change of bells. His basic premise: as a cover
artist and art consultant for The New Yorker and other with-it
periodicals, Spiegelman stands so high as a comics guru in the
estimation of the New York publishing world that he virtually
controls the cartooning profession in that city.
Among the sins this status leads Spiegelman
to commit, according to
Rallz, is that of helping his friends to get cartooning assignments.
>From there, Rallz goes on to criticize Maus and virtually everything
else Spiegelman has done. Most of the criticism, far from
well-considered, is of the pot-shot, sniping ilk. As an analytical
exercise, in other words, it's pretty tepid tea.
But as frothing screed, it sounds exactly
like the fulmination of a
man who feels his talent has been overlooked by the World and who now
stands on a street corner hurling invective at whoever he imagines
has been so obtuse as to have snubbed him.
With all that bile in his belly, it's
a wonder he can take
nourishment.
The tirade is pure envy, through and through.
At every turn, we can
hear Rallz screaming: Why aren't I as famous and powerful in the
cartooning world as Art Spiegelman? How come the Pulitzer Committee
hasn't given me an award?
The reason, of course, is that Rallz is
nowhere near the cartoonist
(or artist) that Spiegelman is. Rallz has no graphic aesthetic
sense, for instance. He barely likes drawing.
"For me," Rallz sez, "the words are the
main point. The graphics
come second. The cartoon is an excuse to present a conversation."
But still he has enough sensibility to realize his drawing is
thoroughly third-rate: "I feel like my art has a long way to go," he
admits. But, on the other hand (with deft self-serving logic), "The
art isn't important at all. You don't need to have good art--as
proven by Thurber, Larson, Callahan."
Well, but--hey--those guys were funny,
Rallz. That's what redeemed
their pedestrian attempts at drawing.
As an example of Rallz's so-called sense
of humor, we have a
generous helping of his crude linoleum block drawings in The Worst
Thing I've Ever Done (66 9x12" pages in paperback for $8.95 from
NBM). I confess neither Rallz's lumpish lop-eyed monotonous drawing
style nor the subjects in this book appeal to me. But we must credit
the man for unabashed outrageousness.
A few years ago, Rallz tells us in his
Introduction, he started
collecting anecdotes by asking people outright--"What's the worst
thing you've ever done?" Astonishingly, people told him. And
after
a couple of years of surveying the American populace, Rallz had 630
sordid, revolting stories to choose from. He chose two dozen and
illustrated them. Some are only a page long; a few are 6-8 pages in
length. Most will turn your stomach.
Here we have the lawn-mowing Mafia, a
bunch of teenagers who, to
retain their monopoly on lawn mowing prices, assault a rival kid and
shove him into a drawer in a nearby mausoleum. When they take him
out the next day, he's lost his mind. What fun.
And there's the woman who recounts the
most sexually exciting
experience of her life--picking up a complete stranger in a bar and
having sex with him in his car outside.
And the guy who tried to kill his pet
rabbit by hitting it on the
head with a bottle, and when that didn't work, he shoved the animal
into the freezing compartment of his refrigerator. When he opened
the door a day or so later, the rabbit was still alive, so he turned
it loose. And, not least, we meet the asshole who poured gasoline on
turtles and set them afire. "I didn't know those turtles could
run
that fast," he says. "They ran until--well, until they stopped.
I
didn't know those turtles could scream either. Could it have been
the hot gasses rushing out of the poor little guys' lungs?"
What fun, like I said. A stunning example
of the Rallz sense of
humor at work.
He differs violently from Spiegelman,
who can draw in a variety of
ways, whose work is often screamingly funny and politically or
socially acute, and who actually likes the work of others in his
profession. No wonder Rallz is so ill at ease with him.
But--wait! Don't go away. Now that I've
brought you along this
far, I can let you in on The Secret. Here it is: the article is a
huge put-on. Yes, a hoax! Rallz is not at all serious in his
vituperative contumely.
With the insight that The Worst Thing
book gives us, we can easily
see that the article is, to Rallz, a gigantic joke. It is born of
the same sense of humor that finds comedy in screaming turtles.
The first clue is in Rallz's copious quotation
of "anonymous"
cartoonists who are so afraid of Spiegelman's power--his undoubted
ability to destroy careers willy-nilly--that they refuse to be quoted
by name. As everyone knows, cartoonists, as a breed, are completely
fearless. So the very notion that Rallz couldn't find anyone
willing to go on record by name is utter hogwash.
And the very number of cartoonists who
allegedly prefer to make
nasty remarks "anonymously" is a dead give-away. There are simply
too many of these gutless wonders; it defies logic.
Clearly, Rallz is making things up as
he goes along--fabricating
charges and accusations and then attributing them to fictitious
"anonymous" cartoonists.
But the final tip-off to the joke lies
in Rallz's discussion of
Spiegelman's drawing style. Rallz calls it "cookie-cutter storyboard
art," flat and one-dimensional.
At this juncture, we know.
Surely, we say, you jest.
The joke, of course, is that cookie-cutter
storyboard art that's
flat and one-dimensional is a perfect description of Rallz's style!
And so, by turning himself inside out--attacking himself as if he
were someone powerful and famous--Rallz reveals that there's
absolutely nothing serious about his article. And he clearly doesn't
intend us to take it seriously. Goodness knows, I don't.

2.
Ten-year Tenure. When I talked with Garfield's Jim Davis on the
eveof the strip's twentieth
anniversary in 1998, among the things Iasked him was how he
felt when the strip hit 2,000 subscribing papersbefore it was even
ten years old. He said that it was a reliefbecause he knew, then,
that he'd be around for a while. He knew hehad a job for life. That's
what syndication used to mean for a cartoonist. Lifetimeemployment at the craft
you loved. And
we had runs of comic strips that spanned decades. No
more, I fear. The
trend, I suspect, is typified by Bill Watterson and Gary Larsonand Berk Breathed.
I imagine that in future we'll have more and morestrips that come and,
despite enormous popularity, go away within adecade or so. The
typical run of a popular strip will be closer toten years than to a
lifetime. That's
probably good. As
fans of a particular strip, we'll be deeply disappointed, ofcourse. All of us
miss Calvin and Hobbes and The Far Side--and, manyof us, Outland and
Bloom County. We always want to hold on to thingswe love, to keep them
forever. But
after awhile, even the founts of creative genius begin to rundry. The gags seem
repetitive and therefore stale. We don't notice,naturally, because
we are encountering day after day the very thingsthat made us love the
feature to begin with. So we welcome therepetition, and the
strip scarcely seems stale because it continuesto give us what we
want. But it's probably pretty threadbarenonetheless. We just
won't admit it. The
new regimen of shorter runs won't permit strips to become stale. They'll all disappear
before that. Moreover,
their disappearance will create vacancies on the comicspages more often, thereby
allowing new strips to emerge with greaterregularity. The profession
as a whole will benefit: more cartoonistswill be able to make
a living at their craft. Meanwhile,
the retired cartooning geniuses will pursue other avenuesof creativity. Gary
Larson, for instance, "went into hiding. Hemade a couple of short
films. He played his guitar. He threw sticksfor his dogs. They
threw some back." The
quotation is from the front flap of the dust jacket for a bookentitled There's a
Hair in My Dirt! A Worm's Story (HarperCollins,$15.95). This is the
first widely-circulated, tangible product ofLarson's retirement
years. Called "an adult children's book," it isa 64-page full-color
ecological exploration in which Larsondemonstrates the essential
unity in nature--all nature, of which,necessarily, homo sapiens
is but a small part. Larson
said he felt guilty about being a party to mankind's"theme-park approach
to nature. We judge plants and animals bywhether they're entertaining
to us." And so in his book, he advisesus to consider communing
with the rest of creation. "Things can below on the food chain,"
he says, "but that doesn't mean they'relowly." Not
only are we part of nature, but nature is a pretty grislyenterprise, according
to Larson. In
the book, a father worm explains this to his son, who has becomedisgruntled because,
among other things, all worms get to do is crawlaround underground
and eat dirt. "Dirt for breakfast, dirt forlunch, and dirt for
dinner," the kid exclaims in exasperation. "Dirt, dirt, dirt!" His
mother interrupts to tell him that if he'll be good and listento his father's story,
they can all have some "fresh, cold dirt fordessert." Father
then regales his son with a tale about a beautiful maiden(well, as beautiful
as Larson can manage--which is to say, ugly) wholoves Nature and wanders
through the countryside gushing about thebirds and animals.
She comes upon a meadow a-bloom with wild flowersand marvels at the
brilliance of the colors: "Oh, Mother Nature," shesays, "what an artist
you are!" Father
worm mutters another, more accurate, assessment: "MotherNature," he says, "what
a sex maniac you are!" And then goes on toexplain that the flowering
meadow is actually "a reproductivebattlefield" in which
"bright colors, nectar, mimicry, deception, andother tricks" are deployed
by flowers in desperate competition forthe "attention of pollinating
insects." This
sort of lesson is repeated throughout the book, which ends witha kind of tragedy for
the beautiful maiden. It's exactly the sort offar-out outcome you'd
expect from Larson; and it serves appropriatelyas the book's finale,
a lesson about life for the young worm and forall of us. Stay
'tooned.